I think that you have your idea of game time all wrong. If the player doesn't play for a week, and then plays 2 hours worth of turns, in effect, only 2 hours have past - the owner of the dive shop has not been waiting a week for his his equipment, he has only been waiting two hours.

I think the way it would work, (as long as there weren't to many rental items), is that where the buffs are, it would also say the rentals and how many minutes you have left. Upon expiration of those "buffs", the rental items would be returned. This sort of action upon the termination of a buff mechanic is already in place with mangled data plates. If, on the other hand, there were enough rental items implemented that it filled up the character pane easily, then the rental items and the times left could be listed on either the character page, or maybe somewhere in you hideout - possibly your journal. The journal could have a page where you keep track of what you are renting in order to return things on time.

Of course, this would require the game to limit each person to one rental of each item at a time, otherwise the game would have to keep track of specific items. As far as I know, from experience with Jick in KoL, that is something that is way to taxing on the database. While normally each item takes up only one row, even if you have 500 of that item, items that are individually tracked each take up a row. (That's the extent of my knowledge on that subject.)

Joined: Thu Sep 06, 2007 10:56 pmPosts: 1466Location: Berkeley when at school, San Diego when at home

neocamp22 wrote:

I think that you have your idea of game time all wrong. If the player doesn't play for a week, and then plays 2 hours worth of turns, in effect, only 2 hours have past - the owner of the dive shop has not been waiting a week for his his equipment, he has only been waiting two hours.

I don't have a personal opinion on this issue, but what you're saying isn't quite right. The days still change.

The real reason for this change being to eliminate the meta-gamey aspects of rentals as they stand now.

I'm not really sure I follow this particular aspect of the argument. Rollover is always taking you from one morning morning to the next evening, and there's all kinds of real-life rental places that say "have it in by the end of the day." Or, in the case of this all-night dive shop, "have it in first thing in the morning, so we can rent it to the day-shift divers." If anything, I'd argue that's LESS metagamey than "you've been swimming around underwater for 120 minutes, and even though you're not done, your equipment just disappeared because it's a rental."

Also, with three pieces to rent, you'd have three separate timers filling up your effects section, and that kind of seems like a waste of space to me.

I really fail to see the problem with this. It's not progress quest. Logging in daily and actively playing daily should give you an advantage over people who don't.

Person A is able to log on for 2 hours sometime during the day. They rent the equipment once, and get to use it for all 2 hours.Person B logs in an hour before rollover. They rent the equipment once. It disappears at rollover. After rollover, they play another hour, possibly renting again.

They both deticated the same amount of time to the game, but person A has an (yes, very small) advantage.

And there are real-life rentals that are done by time. But I guess that still doesn't work if every rollover is a new day. I personally see no satisfying solution to the problem at this time.

I think this is where I step in and say "all right already." Both sides are pretty clear, and I can see that either perspective has advantages and disadvantages. However:1) The current option already exists and works reasonably well2) Picking the other option would be much more of a pain to program for, PLUS3) it would leave the other half of the crowd feeling as put out as the first half does now, PLUS4) I kinda like it the way it is.

Thus, it's not likely to change. I'm not unsympathetic, I just think it's one of those things that could go either way, and I don't see that there'd be a global benefit from the changes. Lots of work to still leave half the people unsatisfied just isn't worth the effort, as far as I see it. That's one of my general philosophies.

On the bright side, when the server isn't a mess, you'll be able to burn 5 times as many turns as you can now, meaning you'll be able to get that much more use out of the rental. So that's good, yeah?

First of all, am I just really missing something about the underwater quest where you don't need rentals? because as of right now, i'm not seeing how rentals are optional if you want to finish quests, and several people have mentioned just ignoring rentals. I guess maybe the stuff drops in a zone i haven't fully explored yet...

I've just come across an item that does indeed make rentals optional. It wouldn't surprise me if a class or two didn't need items to adventure underwater, but being a gadgeteer, I do need at least the one item.